London Transports (3 page)

“I might,” said May, but she knew she wouldn’t.

Charlie came in. He was great fun, very fond of Hell, wanting to be sure she was okay, and no problems. He brought a bottle of wine which they shared, and he told them funny stories about what had happened at the office. He was in advertising. He arranged to meet Hell for lunch next day and joked his way out of the room.

“He’s a lovely man,” said May.

“Old Charlie’s smashing,” agreed Hell. He had gone back home to entertain his wife and six dinner guests. His wife was a marvellous hostess apparently. They were always having dinner parties.

“Do you think he’ll ever leave her?” asked May.

“He’d be out of his brains if he did,” said Hell cheerfully.

May was thoughtful. Maybe everyone would be out of their brains if they left good, comfortable, happy home setups for whatever the other woman imagined she could offer. She wished she could be as happy as Hell.

“Tell me about your fellow,” Hell said kindly.

May did, the whole long tale. It was great to have somebody to listen, somebody who didn’t say she was on a collision course, somebody who didn’t purse up lips like Celia, someone who said, “Go on, what did you do then?”

“He sounds like a great guy.” said Hell, and May smiled happily.

They exchanged addresses, and Hell promised that if ever she came to Ireland she wouldn’t ring up the hotel and say, “Can I talk to May, the girl I had the abortion with last winter?” and they finished Charlie’s wine, and went to sleep.

The beds were stripped early next morning when the final examination had been done, and both were pronounced perfect and ready to leave. May wondered fancifully how many strange life stories the room must have seen.

“Do people come here for other reasons apart from…er, terminations?” she asked the disapproving Irish nurse.

“Oh certainly they do, you couldn’t work here otherwise,” said the nurse. “It would be like a death factory, wouldn’t it?”

That puts me in my place, thought May, wondering why she hadn’t the courage to say that she was only visiting the home, she didn’t earn her living from it.

She let herself into Celia’s gloomy flat. It had become gloomy again, like the way she had imagined it before she saw it. The warmth of her first night there was gone. She looked around and wondered why Celia had no pictures, no books, no souvenirs.

There was a note on the telephone pad.

“I didn’t ring or anything, because I forgot to ask if you had given your real name, and I wouldn’t know who to ask for. Hope you feel well again. I’ll be getting some chicken pieces so we can have supper together around 8. Ring me if you need me. C.”

May thought for a bit. She went out and bought Celia a casserole dish, a nice one made of cast iron. It would be useful for all those little high-protein, low-calorie dinners Celia cooked. She also bought a bunch of flowers, but could find no vase when she came back and had to use a big glass instead. She left a note thanking her for the hospitality, warm enough to sound properly grateful, and a genuinely warm remark about how glad she was that she had been able to do it all through nice Dr. Harris. She said nothing about the time in the nursing home. Celia would prefer not to know. May just said that she was fine, and thought she would go back to Dublin tonight. She rang the airline and booked a plane.

Should she ring Celia and tell her to get only one chicken piece? No, damn Celia, she wasn’t going to ring her. She had a fridge, hadn’t she?

The plane didn’t leave until the early afternoon. For a wild moment she thought of joining Hell and Charlie in the pub where they were meeting, but dismissed the idea. She must now make a list of what clothes she was meant to have bought and work out a story about how they had disappeared. Nothing that would make Andy get in touch with police or airlines to find them for her. It was going to be quite hard, but she’d have to give Andy some explanation of what she’d been doing, wouldn’t she? And he would want to know why she had spent all that money. Or would he? Did he know she had all that money? She couldn’t remember telling him. He wasn’t very interested in her little savings, they talked more about his investments. And she must remember that if he was busy or cross tonight or tomorrow she wasn’t to take it out on him. Like Hell had said, there wasn’t any point in her expecting a bit of cossetting when he didn’t even know she needed it.

How sad and lonely it would be to live like Celia, to be so suspicious of men, to think so ill of Andy. Celia always said he was selfish and just took what he could get. That was typical of Celia, she understood nothing. Hell had understood more, in a couple of hours, than Celia had in three years. Hell knew what it was like to love someone.

But May didn’t think Hell had got it right about telling Andy all about the abortion. Andy might be against that kind of thing. He was very moral in his own way, was Andy.

Holland Park

E
veryone hated Malcolm and Melissa out in Greece last summer. They pretended they thought they were marvellous, but deep down we really hated them. They were too perfect, too bright, intelligent, witty, and aware. They never monopolized conversations in the taverna, they never seemed to impose their will on anyone else, but somehow we all ended up doing what they wanted to do. They didn’t seem lovey-dovey with each other, but they had a companionship which drove us all to a frenzy of rage.

I nearly fainted when I got a note from them six months later. I thought they were the kind of people who wrote down addresses as a matter of courtesy, and you never heard from them again.

“I hate trying to recreate summer madness,” wrote Melissa. “So I won’t gather everyone from the Hellenic scene, but Malcolm and I would be thrilled if you could come to supper on the twentieth. Around eightish, very informal and everything. We’ve been so long out of touch that I don’t know if there’s anyone I should ask you to bring along; if so, of course the invitation is for two. Give me a ring sometime so that I’ll know how many strands of spaghetti to put in the pot. It will be super to see you again.”

I felt that deep down she knew there was nobody she should ask me to bring along. She wouldn’t need to hire a private detective for that, Melissa would know. The wild notion of hiring someone splendid from an escort agency came and went. In three artless questions Melissa would find out where he was from, and think it was a marvellous fun thing to have done.

I didn’t believe her about the spaghetti, either. It would be something that looked effortless but would be magnificent and unusual at the same time. Perhaps a perfect Greek meal for nostalgia, where she would have made all the hard things like pita and hummus and feta herself, and laugh away the idea that it was difficult. Or it would be a dinner around a mahogany table with lots of cut-glass decanters, and a Swiss darling to serve it and wash up.

But if I didn’t go, Alice would kill me, and Alice and I often had a laugh over the perfection of Malcolm and Melissa. She said I had made them up, and that the people in the photos were in fact models who had been hired by the Greek Tourist Board to make the place look more glamorous. Their names had passed into our private shorthand. Alice would describe a restaurant as a “Malcolm and Melissa sort of place,” meaning that it was perfect, understated, and somehow irritating at the same time. I would say that I had handled a situation in a “Malcolm and Melissa way,” meaning that I had scored without seeming to have done so at all.

So I rang the number and Melissa was delighted to hear from me. Yes, didn’t Greece all seem like a dream nowadays, and wouldn’t it be foolish to go to the same place next year in case it wasn’t as good, and no, they hadn’t really decided where to go next year, but Malcolm had seen this advertisement about a yacht party which wanted a few more people to make up the numbers, and it might be fun, but one never knew and one was a bit trapped on a yacht if it was all terrible. And super that I could come on the twentieth, and then with the voice politely questioning, would I be bringing anyone else?

In one swift moment I made a decision. “Well, if it’s not going to make it too many I would like to bring this friend of mine, Alice,” I said, and felt a roaring in my ears as I said it. Melissa was equal to anything.

“Of course, of course, that’s lovely, we look forward to meeting her. See you both about eightish then. It’s not far from the tube, but maybe you want to get a bus. I’m not sure….”

“Alice has a car,” I said proudly.

“Oh, better still. Tell her there’s no problem about parking, we have a bit of waste land around the steps. It makes life heavenly in London not to have to worry about friends parking.”

Alice was delighted. She said she hoped they wouldn’t turn out to have terrible feet of clay and that we would have to find new names for them. I was suddenly taken with a great desire to impress her with them, and an equal hope that they would find her as funny and witty as I did. Alice can be eccentric at times, she can go into deep silences. We giggled a lot about what we’d wear, Alice said that we should go in full evening dress, with capes, and embroidered handbags, and cigarette holders, but I said that would be ridiculous.

“It would make her uneasy,” said Alice with an evil face.

“But she’s not horrible, she’s nice. She’s asked us to dinner, she’ll be very nice,” I pleaded.

“I thought you couldn’t stand her,” said Alice, disappointed.

“It’s hard to explain. She doesn’t mean any harm, she just does everything too well.” I felt immediately that I was taking the myth away from Malcolm and Melissa and wished I’d never thought of asking Alice.

Between then and the twentieth, Alice thought that we should go in boiler suits, in tennis gear, dressed as Greek peasants, and at one stage that we should dress up as nuns and tell her that this was what we were in real life. With difficulty I managed to persuade her that we were not to look on the evening as some kind of search-and-destroy mission, and Alice reluctantly agreed.

I don’t really know why we had allowed the beautiful couple to become so much a part of our fantasy life. It wasn’t as if we had nothing else to think about. Alice was a solicitor with a busy practice consisting mainly of battered wives, worried one-parent families faced with eviction, and a large vocal section of the female population who felt that they had been discriminated against in their jobs. She had an unsatisfactory love life going on with one of the partners in the firm, usually when his wife was in hospital, which didn’t make her feel at all guilty, she saw it more as a kind of service that she was offering. I work in a theatre writing publicity handouts and arranging newspaper interviews for the stars, and in my own way I meet plenty of glittering people. I sort of love a hopeless man who is a good writer but a bad person to love, since he loves too many people, but it doesn’t break my heart.

I don’t suppose that deep down Alice and I want to live in a big house in Holland Park, and be very beautiful and charming, and have a worthy job like Melissa raising money for a good cause, and be married to a very bright, sunny-looking man like Malcolm, who runs a left-wing bookshop that somehow has made him a great deal of money. I don’t
suppose
we could have been directly envious. More indirectly irritated, I would have thought.

I was very irritated with myself on the night of the twentieth because I changed five times before Alice came to collect me. The black sweater and skirt looked too severe, the gingham dress, mutton dressed as lamb, the yellow too garish, the pink too virginal. I settled for a tapestry skirt and a cheap cotton top.

“Christ, you look like a suite of furniture,” said Alice when she arrived.

“Do I? Is it terrible?” I asked, anxious as a sixteen-year-old before a first dance.

“No, of course it isn’t,” said Alice. “It’s fine, it’s just a bit sort of sofa coverish if you know what I mean. Let’s hope it clashes with her decor.”

Tears of rage in my eyes, I rushed into the bedroom and put on the severe black again. Safe is what magazines call black. Safe I would be.

Alice was very contrite.

“I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know why I said that, it looked fine. I’ve never given two minutes’ thought to clothes, you know that. Oh for God’s sake wear it, please. Take off the mourning gear and put on what you were wearing.”

“Does this look like mourning then?” I asked, riddled with anxiety.

“Give me a drink,” said Alice firmly. “In ten years of knowing each other we have never had to waste three minutes talking about clothes. Why are we doing it tonight?”

I poured her a large Scotch and one for me, and put on a jokey necklace which took the severe look away from the black. Alice said it looked smashing.

Alice told me about a client whose husband had put Vim in her tin of tooth powder and she had tried to convince herself that he still wasn’t too bad. I told Alice about an ageing actress who was opening next week in a play, and nobody, not even the man I half love, would do an interview with her for any paper because they said, quite rightly, that she was an old bore. We had another Scotch to reflect on all that.

I told Alice about the man I half loved having asked me to go to Paris with him next weekend, and Alice said I should tell him to get stuffed, unless, of course, he was going to pay for the trip, in which case I must bring a whole lot of different judgements to bear. She said she was going to withdraw part of her own services from her unsatisfactory partner, because the last night they had spent together had been a perusal of
The Home Doctor
to try and identify the nature of his wife’s illness. I said I thought his wife’s illness might be deeply rooted in drink, and Alice said I could be right but it wasn’t the kind of thing you said to someone’s husband. Talking about drink reminded us to have another and then we grudgingly agreed it was time to go.

There were four cars in what Melissa had described as a bit of waste land, an elegantly paved semicircular courtyard in front of the twelve steps up to the door. Alice commented that they were all this year’s models, and none of them cost a penny under three thousand. She parked her battered 1969 Volkswagen in the middle, where it looked like a small child among a group of elegant adults.

Malcolm opened the door, glass in hand. He was so pleased to see us that I wondered how he had lived six months without the experience. Oh come on, I told myself, that’s being unfair, if he wasn’t nice and welcoming I would have more complaints. The whole place looked like the film set for a trendy frothy movie on gracious modern living. Melissa rushed out in a tapestry skirt, and I nearly cried with relief that I hadn’t worn mine. Melissa is shaped like a pencil rather than a sofa; the contrast would have been mind-blowing.

We were wafted into a sitting room, and wafted is the word. Nobody said “come this way” or “let me introduce you” but somehow there we were with drinks in our hands, sitting between other people, whose names had been said clearly, a Melissa would never mutter. The drinks were good and strong, a Malcolm would never be mean. Low in the background a record player had some nostalgic songs from the sixties, the time when we had all been young and impressionable, none of your classical music, nor your songs of the moment. Malcolm and Melissa couldn’t be obvious if they tried.

And it was like being back in Andrea’s Taverna again. Everyone felt more witty and relaxed because Malcolm and Melissa were there, sort of in charge of things without appearing to be. They sat and chatted, they didn’t fuss, they never tried to drag anyone into the conversation or to force some grounds of common interest. Just because we were all there together under their roof…that was enough.

And it seemed to be enough for everyone. A great glow came over the group in the sunset, and the glow deepened when a huge plate of spaghetti was served. It was spaghetti, damn her. But not the kind that you and I would ever make. Melissa seemed to be out of the room only three minutes, and I know it takes at least eight to cook the pasta. But there it was, excellent, mountainous, with garlic bread, fresh and garlicky, not the kind that breaks your teeth on the outside and then is soggy within. The salad was like an exotic still-life, it had everything in it except lettuce. People moved as if in a dance to the table. There were no cries of praise and screams of disclaimer from the hostess. Why then should I have been so resentful of it all?

Alice seemed to be loving every minute of her evening, she had already fought with Malcolm about the kind of women’s literature he sold, but it was a happy fight where she listened to the points he was making and answered them. If she didn’t like someone she wouldn’t bother to do this. She had been talking to Melissa about some famous woman whom they both knew through work, and they were giggling about the famous woman’s shortcomings. Alice was forgetting her role, she was breaking the rules. She had come to understand more about the Melissa and Malcolm people so that we could laugh at them. Instead, she looked in grave danger of getting on with them.

I barely heard what someone called Keith was saying to me about my theatre. I realized with a great shock that I was jealous. Jealous that Alice was having such a nice time, and impressing Melissa and Malcolm just because she was obviously not trying to.

This shock was so physical that a piece of something exotic, avocado maybe, anyway something that shouldn’t be in a salad, got stuck in my throat. No amount of clearing and hurrumphing could get rid of it and I stood up in a slight panic.

Alice grasped at once.

“Relax and it will go down,” she called. “Just force your limbs to relax, and your throat will stop constricting. No, don’t bang her, there’s no need.”

She spoke with such confidence that I tried to make my hands and knees feel heavy, and miracles it worked.

“That’s a good technique,” said Malcolm admiringly, when I had been patted down and, scarlet with rage, assured everyone I was fine.

“It’s very unscientific,” said the doctor amongst us, who would have liked the chance to slit my throat and remove the object to cries of admiration.

“It worked,” said Alice simply.

The choking had gone away but not the reason for it. Why did I suddenly feel so possessive about Alice, so hurt when she hadn’t liked my dress, so jealous and envious that she was accepted here on her own terms and not as my friend? It was ridiculous. Sometimes I didn’t hear from Alice for a couple of weeks; we weren’t soul mates over everything, just long-standing friends.

“…have you had this flat in the City long?” asked Keith politely.

“Oh that’s not my flat, that’s Alice’s,” I said. Alice was always unusual. She had thought that since the City would be deserted at weekends, the time she wanted a bit of peace, that’s where she should live. And of course it worked. Not a dog barked, not a child cried, not a car revved up when Alice was sleeping till noon on a Sunday.

“No, I live in Fulham,” I said, thinking how dull and predictable it sounded.